Joiri Minaya

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, New York, NY) is an artist educated in the Dominican Republic and the United States. She has exhibited her work internationally and won prestigious awards at the XXV Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes; Centro de la Imagen; and XXVII Biennial at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Dominican Republic. She participated in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative at LAXART in 2017 and is a grantee from the Nancy Graves Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. @joiriminaya

Joiri Minaya’s Siboney (2014), questions representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined Caribbean identity recreated through a de-colonial lens. In this video, a tropical landscape becomes the backdrop for the disruption and dissolution of this identity projected on to her by patriarchy and colonialism. Using her body as a medium, she ruptures constructions of female identity, multicultural social spaces, and hierarchies. She describes her work as a reassertion of self—an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing, and exorcising imposed histories, cultures and ideas—using gaps, disconnections, and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity.

Artwork caption: Joiri Minaya, Siboney, 2014, Video, 10 minutes and 4 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and the Eduardo Leon Jimenez Collection. Digital clip made available via the artist’s vimeo page.